America's Cup: quiet boat, noisy sea state in Barcelona

It was touch and go as to whether they would sail on Friday with thunderstorms all around overnight and a fresh, building swell crashing into the Barcelona beachfront and harbour, but NYYC American Magic put on a heck of a display to round off another great week for the team who are riding high in training for the Louis Vuitton 37th America’s Cup.

With the forecasted strong winds eventually filtering in at 15-18 knots from the west-south-west bringing in higher gusts, sensibly the American team opted to just sail one boat today with Paul Goodison and Tom Slingsby taking charge of the patched-up ‘America’ and really putting her through the paces in wave heights that at times topped two metres. This was pure sailing talent on display, arguably the two finest foiling helmsmen of their generation, supported by the genius of Michael Menninger and Andrew Campbell on trim. This wasn’t a day for show-boating and the team just kept it consistent over three hours on the water, picking their moments to tack and gybe and always seeking smoother water where they could.

Noticeable was the trim with slight leeward heel to almost ‘stand’ on the immersed foil and there were some very neat changes in ride height when sailing into the waves upwind with Menninger and Campbell absolutely focussed on keeping the bow out and the power on through the waveforms. Any kind of manoeuvre saw a slight rise in the height prior to the turn and then the AC40 was hunkered back down on course. Downwind they really looked to be enjoying themselves on the waves, picking the path through on quite high ride heights and again the sail trim was pretty much perfect.

As demonstration sailing goes, this one will have piqued interest around the Port Vell with the other teams deciding to stay at their bases. Paul Goodison, always superb in interview, summed it up afterwards saying: “It was a really difficult forecast last night there were questions whether we would be able to sail it or not, some of the chase boats got pulled last night with the thunderstorms and the expected weather so we thought it was prudent to just send one boat out there. We had quite a list of things to try in in this sort of sea state because I think today was probably the biggest sea we've sailed these AC40s in and it was quite challenging, but I think we learned a lot today.”

Asked if they were on the limit today, it was clearly close as Paul said: “I think for the wind obviously we could sail in a little bit more breeze but when you add the swell on as well it's going to be tricky to sail in any bigger waves than that. I think it times we were seeing up to two metre waves and not very easy...The boat was pretty quiet at times today which just shows how much everybody was focusing on doing their job and doing it the best they can.”

One boat testing gives the team the chance to dial in settings and really understand the sail controls and as Paul said: “The conditions obviously really, really, difficult and to get two boats lined up and to get anything productive out of it is very difficult that you've seen this sort of wave state you can have one more drop off the foils and their boats get separated and you kind of spend a lot of time trying to realign to get anything out of it so we decided with these conditions with how tricky it was going to be we're just going to go with the one boat and focus on the list that we had to test.”

NYYC American Magic have concluded their custom foil programme so have reverted both ‘America’ and ‘Magic’ back to one design foil set-ups with Paul explaining the rationale saying: “So, we had a couple of questions to answer on the foils which is why we went back to our custom foils and had a little look at those again last week but now the aim is we're into race training so any sort of aero tests, any sort of racing, if we’ve got equal foils underneath the boats then then both boats are in a very similar situation so we just got the better results from them.”

Brilliant way to conclude the week for the hard-driving American team who set a marker of intent today to conclude their week of training but the grind goes on next week. First class sailing from a first class team...again.